Author
Topic: Help Vet - Help Outbreak. (Read 2896 times)

I am playing threw out break with the "215 Patch" posted by Onemanshow. I want to help with the bug discovery process. I'm not even sure if you want to use the 215 patch? After reading some of your post's at Moddb. If i am going the wrong way with this please stop me and explane how i might help.

I will post pic's to help clarify location's. I'm about 25% threw the game. Only posting if i think i found something that is note worthy.

1. At the start of route kanal. The first train in the game. If the train hit's an NPC on the track and gibs the body the FPS drop's threw the floor. I tested this five time's. Two of the five time's. i used noclip. Cleared the NPC's off the tracks, and gibed their dead body's myself. Then i started the train event, and no fps drop.

2. If i "save game" and die in this area of the game. It will crash EVER TIME when it reloads.

I can load this area with out any crashing.

I wanted to thank all of you guys personally "Vet, Oneman, Biz, Inept and any one who has put time and effort into the Fan made SMod's, and useful information at this website. You guys kick ass with a CAPITAL A.

1) The EP1 engine bugged out the trains in the canal map. The only way to fix it is to remove it.2) That happened to me too. Smod is known to have unexplainable crashes. Unless The Author give us the source code, there is no way to fix the problem.

i sincerely apologize for the amount of time it has taken me to reply to your thread, chang. i'm not sure how exactly this happened. i suppose thinking there was no longer any real interest in it mainly cause of how small the community is, on top of the constant & relentless negativity that became the only real active-activity made me avoid it as much as i could, which resulted in me neglecting this entire section. i just wanted to say i did not see this and ignore it or ignore you more importantly, heh. i would have other wise replied to this instantly, as i am doing now on 10/16/2010 3:39am

gibs/models causing crashes![/b]

thank you for providing a great report with the screens, you are in fact correct about models clipping out of map/through the floors causing crashes, severity of lag/crashes increasing with the complexity of the model that does this

a now confirmed example of this, a few months after your post was when ineptguard and i sat in a conference for about 6 hours trying to trouble-shoot exactly what the hell was causing the issues in route kanal with the train. we messed with everything from the portals to the train models themselves. i tried recompiling all of the train models and changing every class of properties i could, altering the collision models, removing them all together (lol), even the train model itself during the first hour or so, still not resulting in anything good. strange enough the lag -still-occurred even when the razor trains were removed via in the mapadd all together. it seemed to make no sense at all. then, after reviewing original bsp entities, and 2 or 3 alternate bsps from remakes of the campaign by others, then opening coast 7 and observing -when- exactly the choke happens, we realized if you remove the train "right before" the chokes, individually by targetname (each train has several ids), that if removing only the first 2 or 3 i think, the rest of the train would pass normally. thats when guard saw the light haha, said it had to be the path track, and that the lag begins after a certain amount of the train actually clips through the wall (about 20 feet length)

since we already knew how appid15 was a bit more touchy with physics, Aside from the original engine itself suffering same side effects, we simply prevented it from clipping through the wall and recreated a clone path track through mapadd which we werent sure could be done via mapadd (deleting original, then creating a clone with same targetname that would still be recognized by the original entity). thankfully business was able to generate the code pretty much instantly. it was real sensitive though haha, moving that shit even 5 feet closer resulted in train DE-RAILING and clipping through the stairs hahahah

anyway, i think the crash is coming from the "ragdoll_gibs" in npc_gib_model.txt, why it crashes with gibs and not the train is most likely due to the aforementioned - the more complex the model is (more joints/constraint values to calculate), the more fatal the result can be in certain conditions.

i first experienced a model-clip crash when creating a weapon for the combine that used "crossbow_bolt" as the bullet type. for some strange reason, killing any npc wielding a w_model that uses crossbow_bolt (only intended to be used by Player in SP, or as a multiplayer deathmatch weapon), would result in the npc/model falling through the floor on death = crash

this -was- fixed in smod .40 i believe (not the crossbow bolt issue, but the CRASH if npc fell through floor), but it showed how touchy the clipping issue could be. oddly enough, ive occasionally had entire npcs fall through floor without a crash, which is the entire human set of bones heh - yet crashed with smaller models/gibs that would clip through map from any type of powerful/massive impact..such as - huge physics object gibbing npc, or blowing up a bench that is in a "corner of map", having wood chunk or two go through the wall, etc

so chang this [post may have compelled me to finish what i started about 3 weeks ago (since you're the first person ive seen to report this aside from myself), which was recompiling all of the gibs to be more "simple" and hopefully working under "gib2" class in npc_gib_model.txt to avoid such results, or at least likely hood of gibs being able to clip through. the ragdoll_gibs like the head model for example has 4 or 5 joints, the skull, spine, etc. i am certain thats the only reason they can cause possible crashes, so ill try to get those up, then upload them for you, and if you'd be so kind as to test the route kanal area again to see if it works that would be awesome

even to this day i dont think i've got the gibs down and have always lacked in this area

i keep crashing in that same spot!!

ah yeah. see right where you are , i set a trigger a bit farther back in that tunnel to spawn a handful of npc zombies to appear around the area you're in. smod uses the "npc_replace_model.txt" script as we all know...to provide a glorious variety of models for a single npc_type (one of its most appealing features i first fell in love with). so whenever an npc is set to spawn, or in fact appears in any form whatsoever - smod will select any defined models in the script with designated percentages/chance. the problem is....that when you have a larger group of npcs already spawned (and living) when a SAVE is made, upon reload, it can commonly result in the script REASSIGNING npc models that the save game ALREADY accounted for, so theres Crazy side effects to that - anywhere from crashing - to the entire engine suddenly becoming Insane haha, with physics bouncing every where, npcs stuck in a sort of "noclip" movement - to Crashes all together depending on circumstance.

THAT is why i had disabled "autosave" which drove e v eryone crazy haha. and believe me i tried to explain this on moddb and it only caused more confusion. but disabling autosave Simply Reduced the chances of a wacko-load game. while i cannot confirm this 100%, i truly believe that this is the base of the issue

what i could do which i always though of but didnt follow through with, was to recreate specific spawns and even autosave triggers that are targeted in areas that dont have more than 3 or maybe 4 npcs spawned-already, to stay within SAFETY thresh hold of the load-crazyness limits, which probably kick in with 8+ npcs on screen during save or so

heh, its been so long since a -real- thread regarding a real issue from a genuinely interested smod player has come across me, i almost forgot how much i used to love this thing. you kinda tend to forget the good stuff when all you get is shit in your face

hope i wasnt too late in reply (as if 4 months wasnt late)might just have to do somethin about it heh, we'll see